


Loving Bonds

by Kara (magelette)



Category: The Dark Is Rising
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:15:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magelette/pseuds/Kara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even the control of High Magic can't block the power of loving bounds, or the echo of memory waiting to break through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loving Bonds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kirax2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirax2/gifts).



Why Will chose to rent a car and drive out to lonely Cornwall was beyond Bran's understanding, especially since winter in Cornwall was almost as miserable as winter on the farm. Bran had dim memories of wind-swept coasts and craggy cliffs, but he never knew why the remote landscape of Cornwall appealed to him so much. You'd think that Wales would be enough, growing up in the shadow of Cader Idris and Snowdonia. Bran understood the urge to visit Tintagel, since while Arthurian studies was more of a hobby with Will than his 'official' specialization in Romano-British and Celtic ruins of the fifth and sixth centuries, it was almost a tradition with them at this point. They had met, years ago, while Will was off chasing the wild ghosts of Wales' claimed Arthurian heritage. Everyone knew that Arthur was Welsh, even if there were those who claimed that he was born here in dreary Cornwall.

"Out of the way site for a pilgrimage, eh, cariad?" Bran stood shoulder to shoulder with Will, resting his chin on Will's hunched shoulder. The wind howled up from the sea cliffs below, whipping around them in a chilled frenzy. It wasn't a friendly wind – not that the wind that came down off of Cader Idris would ever be friendly, to Bran's eyes, but it didn't welcome them the way that the winds of Snowdonia did.

Or maybe it just didn't welcome Will.

There was something to this rocky shore, to the green-clad stones. It reminded Bran of a lost land that haunted his dreams, of a silver ship and a blazing sword of light – his own personal lightsaber, thanks to the imagination of some American filmmaker. There were lots of strange dreams that danced behind his eyes at night, to the point that Bran wondered if Wales was haunting him, the way Cornwall seemed to haunt the artwork of young Barney Drew.

Maybe he knew this place from one of the paintings that Will hung in their flat in Oxford, knew that tumbled stone steps led down from the cliff-top to a secret cove where a coracle had once been tied. Maybe the familiar song of the wind in his ears reminded him of the howling breath of the Grey King at home, the way it urged him down and down to the shore, instead of up. Gold eyes that see the wind, this time, instead of silver. The old lion said that the king's favorite hound led the way down the steps, protecting the young queen. Well, young, no longer, which is why they'd both been so surprised with the birth, even after—

"Bran?" Will's arms drew him in to a sturdy embrace, Will's warm breath freeing the hold that the cold wind had on him. Those guileless blue eyes looked worriedly into his until Bran was almost lost in their depths, like the sea below. The seas of Cornwall were blue in summer, blue as Will's eyes. Right now, the ocean churned dark as the eyes of his father's lion, his father's—

He stumbled toward the hidden staircase, his feet knowing the way down. Down, down to goblin town, a voice sang in his head, but this was one he recognized from his childhood, not one of the secret ones that sang to him in dreams. His feet, clad in their sturdy boots, found each whole stair as if they had eyes themselves, or had tread this slippery staircase before. He couldn't see anything, couldn't see anything but the rock and the hanging green and the whirls of the sea below. He almost expected a coracle to be bobbing in the waves, pulling at its mooring, waiting for him. Waiting for him and—

There was nothing there. He'd half expected to find a white dog waiting for him – albino dog for an albino boy – but there was nothing.

Except memory.

He could feel himself standing straighter, a new weight settling on his shoulders like a mantle, even though there was no crown binding his brow. The old lion had brought his mother here, figuring that his father would never look for her, not in the place of his own birth. When the brothers of Orkney had come storming the castle in those dark days, the wind sang, his mother had stumbled down those steps to a coracle. Medraught's men waited for them at the coracle, so the old lion himself had opened the great doors of Time and swept them into the mountains of Wales, where his mother herself had been born to the tribes of Gwynedd.

Will's eyes looked so old now, ancient almost, bottomless as the old lion's had been, when they last saw him. When the old lion had tried to save Bran from himself, his heritage, his memory.

"When we first met, you told me that there had been something that you'd forgotten, and you knew that you'd forgotten it. You told me, 'I thought I'd go mad, trying to remember.'" Bran looked thoughtfully at Will. "I didn't really understand, then, exactly what you meant."

Will just stared at him, fascinated. Almost as if he hadn't expected. But love is outside the bonds of time, wasn't it?

"I didn't understand until now. Loving bonds. What that old dewin said, about loving bonds being outside the control of High Magic. Because they're the strongest thing on the earth." Bran looked out at the shore with new eyes, up at the cliffs that had once been home to an old Roman fort, and later, a single tower to hold the Welsh bride of Gorlois.

His mother had loved him that much, loved him enough to spirit him away in order to save his own life. He wondered if it wasn't the blessing of her own love that protected him all these years, that kept that part of his memory alive and separate, unaffected by the High Magic the old lion tried to work.

"You remember." Will's voice came out in a rush of emotion. Bran could hear the relief, the loneliness, the pain of remembering. His cariad knelt on one knee on that wet, sandy shore, looking up at Bran from those old, old eyes, and then grinned.

"My liege."

"Nutter." Bran fell to his knees beside Will, the damp seeping into the knees of his jeans, and kissed his cariad senseless. "You absolute nutter. Why— Why did you come back to Wales that summer? Why did you drag me to Oxford when you knew I could study music just as easily in Wales?"

The answer was easy enough to read in Will's eyes. "Hope. Pure human hope. No gramarye, just the selfish reason that this annoying Welshman with a chip on his shoulder got under my skin one summer and I couldn't shake him, grudge and all." Those blue eyes were sunny now, even as Bran remembered the pain of that summer, the loss and what he'd gained all in a span of less than a year.

Loving bonds, John Rowlands said, but he didn't think that old John had meant it quite in the way that it had unfolded. Well, they were beyond human ken, after all, even beyond the ken of Old Ones like his father's lion.

"What now?" Bran asked, cupping Will's cheek and kissing his lover. His partner. His dewin.

"Now we remember," Will said softly, then helped Bran to his feet.


End file.
